Some people read only one kind of book, others will try anything that comes their way. Books for adults, children, teenagers, fiction, non-fiction, picture books - random acts of reading result in random acts of reviewing, and you will find the results here.
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Monday, April 2, 2018

Alien tango by Gini Koch

Alien tango is the second book in the Alien series, and while you can read it as a stand alone you will get more out of the book if you read Touched by an alien first. This review contains ***SPOILERS*** if you have not already read Touched by an alien so I highly recommend reading the series in order.After all the excitement and action of her introduction to Superbeings and the team from Alpha Centauri coming down to business as usual is a more than a little frustrating for Katherine "Kitty" Katt. Sure, she has an amazing relationship with her team of human and Alpha Centauri operatives, but things have been rather quiet over the past six months and she is starting to get twitchy for some action. They say you should be careful what you wish for, and that is certainly the case for Kitty and her team because they go from zero to crisis point in a matter of hours when a ship that was sent on a long range mission to Mars returns to Earth in a most unexpected fashion. Flying by the seat of her pants, and based mainly on intuition, Kitty manages to get involved right in the thick of the action (as usual). In the midst of chaos Kitty is in her element, but it's also the last place Jeff Martini wants her to be - and when he gets worried he gets uber protective and sulky. As Kitty, Jeff, and the rest of their team start to uncover the different layers of the conspiracy against them they quickly realise that this time they can't stop the big bad by the usual methods - this is an enemy where working smarter is the key, not using bigger weapons. Fighting the enemy is what they are quickly becoming used to, but what happens when the person who feels like an enemy is your family? The time has finally come for Kitty to meet Jeff's family and it is going to be a somewhat bumpy ride for everyone because Kitty is not your typical A-C female, and when she sees something wrong she deals with it. I first read Touched by an alien over three years ago, and seeing another book in the series made me decide to re-read it and I am glad I did because it reminded me how much I had enjoyed the book and I dove straight into reading Alien tango to keep the roller coaster ride going. Alien tango picks up a few months after Touched by an alien and while there are common threads through the series so far, each book does have a focus on a different conspiracy and enemy for the team to deal with. Kitty is one of my favourite anti-heroes, mainly because she doesn't care what people think about her and she is not afraid to fight for what she believes in (and is not so tough that she also doesn't burst into tears occasionally). The cast of A-C characters also adds to the charm of the series because the way they react to things and the way they function is just so - alien. Sometimes the differences result in laugh out loud moments, sometimes they result in eye rolling moments, and sometimes you just go "huh". Jeff Martini and Christopher White create quite a few comic moments because of who they are for the A-C community, and also because of who they are - and the A-C women add some great moments too. It is interesting that Koch has been able to create such a human seeming alien race, and she has deftly inserted them into the human race in a way that makes sense and you can easily picture a race of aliens living amongst Earths people just like this.

Currently waiting for the third book in the series to arrive so I can keep the fun going and see where Koch takes Kitty and Jeff next - because it is bound to be a thrill ride, but it is also hard to see how she can top what happened in the first two books in the series.